Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Anachronism as Responsible Pedagogy

I am finally back from a lovely and stimulating Kalamazoo. It was great to meet so many people, and to hear some excellent papers.

I've posted here my contribution to the panel on "Productive Anachronism" organized by Jonathan Newman and Anna Wilson. It was excellent, and dare I say, productive. Our conversation considered the connections between our work as scholars and our work as teachers. Also, see here for Robin Wharton's (one of my fellow presenters) essay. I had hoped to clean this up and include notes, but like many of us (tell me I'm not alone!), I am returning to a mountain of grading. I plan on expanding this, actually, into a slightly longer piece. So, watch this space.

Anachronism as Responsible Pedagogy

Let me begin this short paper with an
analogy—not a historical one, but hopefully a productive one nonetheless. In
China Mieville’s The City and the City,
citizens of Beszel live in a city that somehow shares space with another city:
Ul Qoma. (It is never made clear if this is an alternate reality or if the
situation is purely psychological bifurcation.) Citizens in one city can
physically see citizens from the other, but because of some exceptional
political mechanisms and long-standing social taboos, a Besz citizen must unsee a neighbor from Ul Qoma and vice
versa. Typical spatial logic is broken up in the world Mieville creates, and so
the two cities are interwoven as opposed to occupying discrete areas. The result is that your neighbor just a few
feet from your elbow might be in another city, and thus unseeable. Mieville’s notion of unseeing has resonance with many contemporary concerns regarding how
communities are created and maintained (including how some are excluded), but
perhaps because I heard Carolyn Dinshaw’s excellent talk “All Kinds of Time” at
NCS Portland during the time I was reading this book, I have also come to think
that this idea neatly describes a dilemma of responsible historicism and
interpretation. Apprehending the distant (and even the near) past creates an
epistemological problem, for we want to understand the past in its own terms
without imposing presentist biases. But, to apprehend the distant past without
acknowledging that we see through other time periods and temporalities is to essentially
unsee those times. In this short
paper, I take the position that anachronism, as well as historical analogy, is
not only a productive and responsible way to approach the past, but it is also
perhaps the most intellectually honest way as well. Specifically, I want to advocate that we
encourage anachronism in the classroom, not just in discussion (this, it seems
to me, is almost inevitable), but also in the written works and projects we
assign.

In my own experience in the
classroom, my students often want to make anachronistic or analogous connections
during discussion. Something we read reminds them of a movie or tv show or book,
and when they start to make their point, it is always with embarrassment and
self-consciousness. Sometimes they are just embarrassed to admit their viewing
habits to me, but I am increasingly convinced that they feel like it is simply
taboo to bring in their own life-worlds as a part of our analysis. Acknowledging
that they come from a specific point of view would, they feel, shatter the
claim to objectivity, which for them is the ideal they ought to reach for. What
I repeatedly remind them of during the semester, however, is that objectivity
in their writing is mostly a rhetorical fiction. Lee Patterson, in his Negotiating the Past, discusses the
fault lines in any claim to objectivity in historical scholarship, observing: “Moreover,
it must ignore the correlative fact that the objects with which the human
sciences deal can never be wholly other from the interpreting self over against
which they stand; on the contrary, they are themselves constituted by means of
the very subjectivity that characterizes the interpreter. Rather than a dangerous intruder that must
not be allowed to contaminate the procedures of historical research,
subjectivity is in fact the condition of all
understanding: if texts are to be understood at all they must be capable of being
taken up into consciousness and rendered part of the subject.” I quite love the
term “dangerous intruder,” incidentally. The phrase truly captures how my
students often react to the idea of using “I” in their essays. To do so, they
have invariably been taught, is to allow a dangerous interloper, their own
subjectivity (demeaningly cast as “mere opinion”) to run rampant through
otherwise objective literary analyses. Even if they don’t acknowledge the “I”
that is writing, I tell them, it’s there. We might as well embrace it.

We cannot, then, separate so easily
the interpreting-“I” from the object it surveys. This entwining of subject and
object creates, as Dipesh Chakrabarty describes in Provincializing Europe, a sense of temporal heterogeneity, causing,
at once, the subject analyzing to be out of sync with the present moment and
the object analyzed to be contemporaneous. Chakrabarty writes “One could argue,
for instance, that the writing of medieval history for Europe depends on this
assumed contemporaneity of the medieval, or what is the same thing, the
noncontemporaneity of the present with itself.
The medieval in Europe is often strongly associated with the
supernatural and the magical. But what
makes the historicizing of it possible is the fact that its basic
characteristics are not completely foreign to us as moderns.” He goes on to
argue that for history to have any meaning for our own life-worlds, we must, in
addition to historicizing, also think through anachronism, treating the past as
contemporaneous rather than remote and distant.

With this in mind, I would like to now
turn to how I have seen anachronism and analogy work in my own classes. When I
wrote the abstract for this short paper, however, I suggested that I would
share the fruits of my encouraging my students to embrace anachronism. Upon
sitting down to write this, though, I realized that what I really want to talk
about is they pushed me to think
about the productive value of anachronism.

In the first instance, I offered a
creative option as an assignment and let my students write a short scene that
would occur within one of the narrative gaps of the text. One particular
student decided to write about Caliban in the Tempest, and reimagined Caliban as a blogger. When I first
assigned this creative option, I expected that everyone would write in the
spirit of, shall we say, historical fiction. The student decided instead to
move Caliban forward into the future. As a way to express his rage and his
fondness for cursing, she gave him a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection. He
impotently raged against Prospero, and it never was clear whether or not poor
Caliban had any sort of readership. I thought that I was innovating by allowing
a critical/creative assignment in my class, but my student challenged me to
rethink the sort of creative work I was really after. In her imagining of
Caliban’s blog, she helped me to see how modern a figure he might be, even if his
modernity was undercut by his evident wildness. Caliban may exist as someone
outside of time, a wild man figure, but he is also of the moment, painfully
contemporary. For example, he may represent the latest spoils of colonialist
exploration. The Tempest is a text
imbricated with all sorts of time, and my student only heightened its sense of
anachronism. In going back to her essay to write this paper, I also discovered
a detail I had forgotten. As a component of the assignment I asked students to
write what I call metacommentary, that is a self-reflective discussion of the
choices they made as writers. In going back, I discovered that she was partly
inspired by the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. My student
wanted to restore Caliban’s voice, just as the internet gave voice to the
Egyptian people.

In my second example, another student of
mine wrote her essay through the lens of a contemporary event. This time the
text was Marie de France’s Bisclavret,
which I have taught a few times. During discussion, most students initially
feel a sense of revulsion against the lady. "How could she betray her
husband just for a slight lycanthropic problem?" The lordly werewolf was
the clear hero, and his one-time lady was a clear villain. No one seems particularly
concerned at first with how the lady is tortured and punished. After pursuing
such a reading for a while, I then pose the following question: "is there
any way to read the lady as a victim?" After a few blank stares, they
start to take to this new subject. They realize that the lay opens with a
description of ferocious werewolves, and that this might be the only knowledge
of the beast that the lady would have, and so the lady might be justifiable in
her decision to escape her husband at any cost. At some point in this
discussion, I state that although we could not necessarily read the text as a
strict parable of domestic violence, the parallels should at least give us
pause. In response to this, my student decided to explore this idea even further,
reading the text in light of Congress's failure to authorize The Violence
against Women Act. In her analysis, she was sensitive to historical readings of
the place and power of women during the Middle Ages, and she did significant
research on this subject. But in closing her essay, she sought to make a
broader point, that Marie's text can serve as a reminder and as a warning about
the fragile power structures that women still find themselves enmeshed in.

Now, in closing this essay, I want to return to the short quote I offered from
Chakrabarty—immediately following it is a parenthetical that reads “(which is
not to deny the historical changes that separate the two).” Taking the past as
in some ways contemporaneous does not erase the efforts of historicism, which
tries to understand the past in its own context. We need to do this work, and
we need to encourage our students to do so as well, but we cannot easily claim
that we can purge the present from our thinking. We cannot unsee other times when we view the past. Anachronism does not deny
the difference between past and present, but it makes interpretation possible,
and it bridges the gap between different times while also preserving and highlighting
the distance between them, a distance that can only be crossed through
subjective and creative apprehension. And, after attending postmedieval’s
session today on Thriving, I am also reminded that anachronism can make this
work joyful as well. Thank you.

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